The unsettled question about Osama's phone

On Friday, Porter Goss, former Republican member of the US House of Representatives and current director of the CIA wrote in the New York Times:

Recently, I noticed renewed debate in the news media over press reports in 1998 that Osama bin Laden's satellite phone was being tracked by United States intelligence officials. In the recent debate, it was taken for granted that the original reports did not hurt our national security efforts, and any suggestions that they did cause damage were dismissed as urban myth. But the reality is that the revelation of the phone tracking was, without question, one of the most egregious examples of an unauthorized criminal disclosure of classified national defense information in recent years. It served no public interest. Ultimately, the bin Laden phone went silent.

Thus restating the charge that Osama stopped using his satellite phone following the 1998 reports. There is a basic inconsistency between this charge and accounts of the Tora Bora siege in 2001; we noted this before but since Goss is still peddling the original shite without reconciling it with the Tora Bora events, it's worth setting out again.

Just over a week ago, the Washington Post reported on the strange case of Abdallah Tabarak, a Moroccan alleged to be one of Osama Bin Laden's most valued assistants. Tabarak was captured right after the Tora Bora siege and detained at Guantanamo Bay, but was released to the Moroccans a couple of years ago and appears to be leading a normal life in Casablanca. But consider the accounts of what he did for Osama:

According to Moroccan and other foreign intelligence officials, Tabarak sacrificed himself so the others could escape. He took bin Laden's satellite phone, which the al Qaeda leader apparently assumed was being tracked by U.S. spy technology, and walked toward the Pakistani border as the al Qaeda leadership fled in the opposite direction. The ruse worked, although Tabarak and others were captured.

Now this story is denied by Tabarak's lawyer, but it has repeatedly circulated since Tora Bora. Of course the Pentagon could always clear it up with a full accounting of what happened at Tora Bora, though that has always been awkward since it relates to the question of whether there was already a diversion of troops for Iraq. But at the very least they could publicly state that the story of Tabarak's role couldn't be right, because Osama had previously stopped using his phone due to the 1998 media reports about it. Of course maybe that is the truth, which would explain why Tabarak was released.

However, since the story is getting a bit confused (confusion between a persistent asset of the White House), it's best broken down to a simple questions for the Pentagon: Did Osama have a satellite phone at Tora Bora? Any response other than 'No' adds to the questions about the media-busted-our-spying story that the head of the CIA is peddling.